(This
is a long article that requires time and thought. It may be easier
to print it out to read after you are done browsing. All highlighting
in this article is mine.Source:
The Chronicle of Higher Education *
April 17, 1998 * Page B4-B5)

We are not likely to convince students that racist views are wrong
if we teach them only about biology and ignore culture. The basic
facts about the broad patterns of human biological variation and “race”
are fairly clear and well established: Individual human beings undeniably
differ in myriad ways, and each specific difference may be important.
Variation in skin color, for example, affects susceptibility to sunburn,
skin cancer, and rickets. Variations in body build affect the ability
to keep warm or cool; variation in the shape of the nose affects its ability
to warm and moisten the air inhaled. Unseen genetic variations protect
some people from (and predispose other people to) diseases ranging from
malaria and smallpox to diabetes and cancer.
However, “races” as imagined by the public do not actually exist.
Any definition of “race” that we attempt produces more exceptions than
sound classifications. No matter what system we use, most people
don’t fit.
As almost every introductory textbook in physical anthropology explains,
the distinctions among human populations are generally graded, not abrupt.
In other words, skin color comes in a spectrum from dark to light, not
just broad or narrow. Furthermore, the various physical traits such
as skin color and nose shape (plus the enormous number of invisible traits)
come in an infinite number of combinations; one cannot predict other traits
by knowing one trait that a person possesses. A person with dark
skin can have any blood type and can have a broad nose (a combination common
in West Africa), a narrow nose (as many East Africans do), or even blond
hair (a combination seen in Australia and New Guinea).
Of the 50,000 to 100,000 pairs of genes needed to make a human being, perhaps
35,000 to 75,000 are the same in all people, and 15,000 to 25,000 may take
different forms in different people, thus accounting for human variation.
But only a tiny number of these genes affect what many people might consider
to be racial traits. For example, geneticists believe that skin color
is based on no more than 4 to 10 pairs of genes. The genes of black
and white Americans probably are 99.9 percent alike.
In addition, studies of the human family tree based on detailed genetic
analysis suggest that traits such as skin color are not even good indicators
of who is related to whom, because the trains occur independently in several
branches of the human family. When we consider the pairs of genes
that may differ among humans, we see that, beyond the genes determining
skin color, black people from Africa, Australia, and the south of India
are not particularly closely related to each other genetically.
All of this means that variations among “races” cannot possibly explain
the difference in behavior or intelligence that people think they see.
Although black Americans on average receive lower scores on standardized
tests than do white Americans, neither “race” is actually a biological
group. Skin color alone cannot account for the differences in group
averages. Although we know a great deal about the role of many of
our genes—for instance, which ones cause sickle-cell anemia—no genes are
known to control differences in specific behavior or in intelligence among
human groups. Even if someone discovered such genes, we have no reason
to assume that would correlate with skin color any more than most other
genes do.
Anthropologists and other academics must do a better job of communicating
these facts to our students and to the public at large. But even
if we make sure that everyone understands these facts, racism will persist—unless
we convince people that a different explanation for variations in behavior
makes more sense. The alternative that we need to emphasize is the
concept of culture—but a concept of culture far deeper and more sophisticated
than that taught by many multiculturalists.
The anthropological concept of culture can be explained best by an analogy
with language. Just as language is more than vocabulary, culture
is more than, say, art and music. Language has rules of grammar and
sound that limit and give structure to communication, usually without conscious
thought. In English, for example, we use word order to convey the
relationship among the words in a sentence. Latin uses suffixes to
show relationships; Swahili uses prefixes. Even languages as similar
as French, Spanish, and Italian use different subsets of the many sounds
the human mouth can make.
Equally, culture structures our behavior, thoughts, perceptions, values,
goals, morals, and cognitive processes—also usually without conscious thought.
Just as each language is a set of arbitrary conventions shared by those
who speak the language, so each culture is made up of its own arbitrary
conventions. Many languages work perfectly well; many cultures
do, too.
Just as familiarity with the language of one’s childhood makes it harder
to learn the sounds and grammar of another language, so one’s culture tends
to blind one to alternatives. All of us—Americans as well as members
of remote Amazonian tribes—are governed by culture. Our choices in
life are circumscribed largely by arbitrary rules, and we have a hard time
seeing the value of other people’s choices and the shortcomings of our
own. For example, many societies exchange goods not for profit, but
to foster social relationships, as most Americans do within their own families.
Some peoples prefer to maintain their surrounding environment rather than
to seek “progress.” Other groups have a very different sense than
we do of the balance between individual freedom and responsibility to one’s
community.
Besides teaching our students about the importance of culture, we need
to revive the anthropological concept of cultural relativism—perhaps the
most important concept that liberal education can teach. The enemies
of relativism have claimed that the concept means that everything is equal—that
no moral judgements are possible, that Americans must accept whatever other
people do. But this is not what relativism means.
What it does mean is that we must look carefully at what other people are
doing and try to understand their behavior in context before we judge it.
It means that other people may not share our desires or our perceptions.
It also means that we have to recognize the arbitrary nature of our own
choices and be willing to re-examine them by learning about the choices
that other people have made. In medicine, for example, many cultures
have long tried to treat the whole patient, mind and body together, which
some of our doctors are just beginning to focus on, having been trained
instead to concentrate on treating a particular disease.
The key point is that what we see as “racial” differences in behavior
may reflect the fact that people have different values, make different
choices, operate with different cultural “grammars,” and categorize things
(and therefore think) in different ways. Over the years, we have
learned that culture shapes many things we once thought were determined
by biology, including sexuality, aggression, perception, and susceptibility
to disease. But many people still confuse the effects of biology
and those of culture.
For example, we still use analogy problems to test students’ skill in logic,
which we then define as innate, genetically driven intelligence, which,
some argue, differs by “race.” But solving the problems depends on
putting items into categories, and the categories we use are cultural,
not universal. Giving the correct answer depends less on inherent
intelligence than it does on knowing the classification rules used by those
who created the test. Most U.S. students would flunk analogy problems
put to them by Mesoamerican peasants, who divide things into “hot” and
“cold”—categories that, in their usage, go far beyond physical temperature
To communicate the importance of culture to students, we have to make some
adjustments in our teaching. First, we have to stop teaching world
and American history in ways that deny the contributions of others and
prevent thoughtful analysis of our own actions. Teaching along these
lines has improved, but it can be better yet. For instance, how many
students are taught that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were speculators
who wanted to enrich themselves with land on the Western frontier—land
the British had intended to reserve for Native American use?
We also have to stop teaching or accepting the idea that humans are divided
into three races—Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid—an idea that is at least
50 years out of date. I constantly face students who have been taught
the concept of three races in the 1990s by high-school and college teachers
in other social sciences.
In addition, psychologists, in particular, must stop assuming that only
one pattern exists for human cognition, perception, formation of categories,
and so forth. All too many psychologists believe that standardized
I.Q. tests are equally valid for assessing individuals from different cultural
backgrounds. Operating from that mistaken assumption, they teach
a narrow view of “correct” human behavior, which promotes racism.
We must realize that students from some minority groups are likely to do
badly on I.Q. tests for a variety of reasons beyond the poor health, nutrition,
and education that many of them have experienced because of poverty.
The content of the tests is biased toward students in the mainstream, both
in terms of the subject matter of the questions and in more subtle ways,
such as expectations about what is important in a problem.
And some minority students see no reason to try to do well on I.Q. tests.
They may not expect to go to college. Their sense of self-worth may
depend on their lack of interest in the mainstream culture, which they
feel has rejected them. Many scholars of colonialism have described
how members of oppressed minorities create a sense of community by choosing
to ignore their colonizers’ culture. John Ogbu, an anthropologist
at the University of California at Berkeley, has shown that the same phenomenon
occurs in U.S. schools.
Thus, scores on I.Q. tests depend not only on how “smart” one is, but also
on familiarity with middle-class, white American culture. Different
cultural groups are likely to pay more attention to different parts of
test questions, not even noticing what someone from another group would
consider crucial. A student who did not grow up in the middle class
might well believe that to appear smart, one should give a slow, thoughtful
answer—not a snap answer or sound bite. Such a student will probably
be put off by the idea of competitiveness and individual ranking, and thus
by the whole experience of the I.Q. test.Anthropologists must do a better job of communicating these and
other important facts about human biological and cultural variation to
their students and to the public at large. Rather than revel in the
details of obscure populations, our courses in cultural anthropology should
focus on interpretations of significant contemporary events. We have
to demonstrate to students that not all events outside—and even within—the
United States can be understood from the single cultural perspective that
other social sciences tend to teach.
We can be more outspoken in the media about alternative perspectives on
international events, seeking opportunities to explain cultural practices
and conventions in other countries that may lead to their different decisions
and priorities. Indeed, anthropologists have to be more confident
about the significance of their discipline and more willing to assert the
importance of their knowledge. We need to find ways to work both
with faculty members in other disciplines and with policy makers to convey
our awareness that, in virtually every contemporary problem, different
participants not only speak differently but also think differently.
For example, we could attempt to understand the behavior or Iranians in
the United States’ 20-year-old confrontation with Iran by looking objectively
at their culture and history, and at ours. One of the most obvious
points is that traditional Iranian leadership involves a blend of religious
and secular power that is foreign to Americans. The result is that
leaders of the two countries have very different agendas. And many
Iranians have a different sense of the proper balance among business, profit,
family, community, and spirituality.
We must show our students that they, just as much as our adversaries or
“primitive peoples” in isolated cultures, are bound by the arbitrary rules
of their own culture. If we don’t teach these points, we are failing
to show that racist assumptions about why people behave as they do are
not legitimate.
We also have to stop focusing on details of the human fossil record in
our introductory physical-anthropology courses. Basic courses should
deal instead with human variation in a variety of populations, by looking
at such issues as fertility, mortality, growth, nutrition, adaptation to
the environment, and disease. It would be productive to teach, for
example, that hypertension and diabetes are not simply natural results
of individual genetic endowment or the aging process but, in fact, rarely
occur among people whose food does not go through the commercial processing
that is customary in the West.
Finally, administrators and professors across the disciplines need to recognize
that it is crucial for all students to understand the concepts of culture
and cultural relativism—not the inaccurate caricatures of these concepts
that have been bandied about in the culture wars, but the sophisticated,
carefully defined and nuanced versions that anthropologists have evolved
over decades of work. Cultural relativism is the only road to tolerance
and real freedom of thought, because it lets us get outside the blinders
imposed by our own culture. It must be built into courses taught
in core curricula—not taught only as an elective frill if a student happens
to sign up for an anthropology course.

Mark
Nathan Cohen is a professor of anthropology at the State University of
New York College at Plattsburgh and the author of Culture of Intolerance:
Chauvinism, Class, and Racism in the United States (Yale University Press,
1998).